“Bill, I’m coming in, if that’s okay.” He shone his light inside. “If you can hear me, just make a sign…anything.”

Andy counted off the few seconds – nothing but silence. He swallowed noisily, and then moved inside, avoiding the fallen furniture and going quickly from room to room. The smell was worse in the small building, and he held his breath as he searched. In a few minutes he had examined the house in detail, and stood again on the porch.

“Nothing, Frank; are we sure they were home?” He looked up to the sky, hundreds of feet overhead; suddenly wishing he was up there.

“Yep,” Frank said. “Neighbor said he saw them only an hour before, and he’s sure they didn’t leave. Have you looked everywhere – the perimeter?”

“I’ll do a final sweep now.” Andy stepped off the porch. The lawn was littered with dead birds down here too, but incongruously, it otherwise seemed almost untouched by the drop into the pit – as if it had been lowered gently. Flowers in their beds still stood upright, their blooms straining towards sunlight they would never feel again. There was a wheelbarrow, with gloves laid over one handle, and a flagstone pathway ran for two dozen feet to abruptly stop at a wall of dirt and rock.

Andy circled the house. He had about twenty feet of space between himself and the walls of the sinkhole. They looked solid and not saturated, as he would have expected.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he whispered.

He knew sinkholes occur because groundwater erodes away porous limestone creating a karst feature below the surface shell. Eventually the ground just collapses into the void that’s been created, and might have been there hiding for days, months or even years. But water is the key ingredient, and down here it was dry…and hot.

“Talk to me, Andy.” Frank’s voice sounded tight.

“It doesn’t make sense – it’s bone dry down here.” Andy continued to pan his light.

“Maybe drained away. That pocket could be years old, and by now we have a total percolation effect. Water’s long gone – it happens,” Frank said.

“Yeah, but in limestone, and not in bedrock like this. This just feels…different.” Andy walked to one of the walls and frowned – there was something on it, or pressed into it – a symbol or shape. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small camera, taking a few images, and then turning to snap off some more pictures of the structure and size of the cavity.

He tucked the camera away and then reached out to touch the dark soil where the shape was indented. It was soft and spongy, like Styrofoam packing. He knew the earth was capable of some amazing feats – it could sink, rise up in columns or waves, it could spin like a whirlpool, and become as hard as rock or soft like quicksand. But this was something outside of his experience. Besides, as he’d said to Frank, down this far, it would have to be mostly bedrock, not soil.